Stop asking Google “When’s the best time to send an email?”. Google doesn’t know, as great as it is.

Your search probably yielded conflicting results even amongst highly credible sources, leaving you no closer to an answer. Or you may have conducted countless A/B tests of different send times, still leaving you no closer to a conclusive time that works best.

While there may be send times that work better than others, there are simply too many factors at play for there to be one definitive ‘most optimal send time’. It just doesn’t exist. Think about it, even within the most niche of industries or smallest of segments, people will still check emails at different times.

The solution?

Send time personalization means scheduling an email to send to a contact at the time that they’re mostly likely to open and engage. It means leveraging the data you have on each individual contact, namely when they open, click, and convert by both time of day, and day of week.

In other words, it isn’t about engaging is a wild-goose chase trying to figure out the best send time across the board, but rather a calculated approach to figure out the best send time for each individual.

How it works?

A send time personalization platform utilizes data to build a profile for each email address based on previous engagement. It differentiates itself from other email send optimization methods such as time zone sending in the sense that it doesn't require location data such as an IP address or a zip code to work.

We’ll take a look at the integration of HubSpot and Seventh Sense. At every contact point with your HubSpot users, engagement data is being generated and stored whether on the sales or marketing growth stack. Seventh Sense comes into play through its artificial intelligence and predictive analytics system which pulls and analyzes contact data from HubSpot.

This connection between email and marketing data allows you full visibility into when each individual contact is engaging with your emails as well as the ability to leverage that data to optimize future sends. If Joan the CEO is most likely to open an email at 10 AM, then that’s when we’ll want to get to her, not at some arbitrary time you Googled.

Great, but what if you don’t have past engagement data?

Well then, the send time personalization platform would take a randomizing approach for each individual. So instead of you experimenting with different send times for your lists and seeing which time yields the marginally highest overall open rate, Seventh Sense randomly picks a time for each email send to each new contact. Each send time will be different for each individual. This drives new contact engagement as well as builds up data for future send time personalization.

Another instance where you’d want to randomize send time is for a reengagement campaign. Before giving up on unengaged audiences, give it another go – Seventh Sense will change up send times, collect new data, and adjust profiles based on that.

Why it matters?

The average business person receives an average of about 90 emails a day, a number that’s likely much higher for decision makers. If that wasn’t disheartening enough, email response rates drop by over a whopping 50% an hour after send time, and plummets even faster after that.

The good news? Human beings are creatures of habit. We have relatively routine workdays and weekends, hence resulting in predictable email habits. We have particular times of day and days of week where we check and are more inclined to respond to emails.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that getting a recipient to open an email is one baby step closer to a conversion, our end goal. If you want to give your emails the best chance of being opened (or even A chance really), it needs to be sitting at the top of your recipient’s inbox during the times they typically check their inbox and deal with emails. The bad news is if you miss that window, the chances of your email being opened are slim to none. And because that window will be different for everyone, send time matters, a lot.

Timing may not be EVERYTHING, but it can make or break your sales

So you crafted a mind-blowing content marketing strategy, your subject line can’t be said no to, your database is as clean as clean gets, your targeting is on point, you did it all.

But here’s the deal, you’re not getting any closer to a conversion and all that effort will essentially mean nothing if you can’t get that open. And you can’t get that open if your email is buried in your recipients’ inbox. Remember, 90 emails a day?

Batch send emails are truly a thing of the past. Take the guesswork out of the game and deliver your emails to prospects right when they’ll get to it. Research has found that send time personalization increases the rate of response by over 38% across the board. If you’re in sales, you know that this can mean the difference between a closing and losing a deal.

Born and raised in Malaysia, Audrey ventured out to the States in 2015 to obtain a bachelor’s degree in Retail and Consumer Behavior. Never quite fitting the left brained or right brained mold, Audrey loves digging into consumer data and research to drive unique content creation. When she’s not geeking out on digital marketing, you’ll find her playing any kind of sport from Ultimate Frisbee to volleyball to climbing.